The AP has also confirmed it received a letter from US defence secretary Robert Gates asking the agency not to publish it.

Now the agency has explained its decision – including the following from the AP’s director of photography, Santiago Lyon:

“AP journalists document world events every day. Afghanistan is no exception. We feel it is our journalistic duty to show the reality of the war there, however unpleasant and brutal that sometimes is.”

The Associated Press has signed a deal to distribute the work of of four non-profit journalism groups.

Work by the Center for Public Integrity, the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and ProPublica will be free for publication by the agency’s 1,500 newspaper members.

From the Reporters’ Committee for Freedom of the Press last week: “A federal court in New York on Tuesday refused to dismiss a lawsuit by The Associated Press that claims a competing news service, All Headline News Corp., misappropriated its news content by drafting stories based on AP reports.” The AP had filed suit against a company, which it claims copied and rewrote AP stories. Full story at this link…

A comment from Paul Colford, from the AP’s corporate communications department, on the BuzzMachine post said:

“We understand that The Star-Ledger and the media industry as a whole are facing difficult financial challenges and that in this environment many newspapers are experimenting with news priorities and with their presentation of news. The Associated Press has been working with all members of the cooperative, including The Star-Ledger, to determine their needs and to ensure that the AP news report retains its value to them and their readers. Member Choice, the content and pricing initiative rolled out this summer, was in fact developed as a response to member requests for simpler content and pricing options.”

The Associated Press didn’t know what it stepped in when it sent a lawyer’s letter to the blog Drudge Retort (a Drudge Report parody) demanding that it take down headlines and excerpts from wire-service stories as short as 33 words long. This set off a bl

The supervisory board of Wegener, the Dutch newspaper group 87 per cent-owned by Mecom, resigned on Friday in a row with David Montgomery, the company’s executive chairman over the appointment of a new chief executive.

We are really excited to announce that we have just integrated with Twitter. What that means is that when you make a prediction on Hubdub you can then immediately drop it into your Twitter stream. Additionally, you can opt to save your Twitter log in deta

It was a picture that would make many blush: Cristiano Ronaldo, in swimming shorts, nestling between the legs of his bikini-clad girlfriend on a beach in Sardinia, a fig leaf for her dignity. The Daily Mail ran it on page 23, in among other less racy shot

“There appears to be no compromise. The BBC feels it is acting logically by fulfilling its public service remit. Regional owners are also acting logically by defending their turf. In truth, both reflect the fact that none of us know what the future holds.

“most media people don’t realise that blogging is a community strategy. They think of it as a publishing process and, perhaps, as articles published with a particular tone of voice. They certainly don’t think of it as a conversation.”

Semantic journalism is a vision for the future of journalism. As the writer works on her article, her computer would gather data on the matter, from pictures to other articles to assessing global opinion trends.